Shadow Flora

The Shadow Flora are a collection of 250 unique living works of generative image feedback art created by Andrew Benson. Each begins as a color seed that grows from the shadows into a luminous composition that seeks an active equilibrium state.

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How Shadow Flora Grow

Shadow Flora NFTs show a still image captured from a developed Shadow Flora simulation, paired with a working WebGL-driven simulation linked from the "animation_url" field of the metadata. To see your NFT in its true form, visit the site linked from the description of the token itself.

Each of the flora are formed from a small seed of generated colors that, through an image feedback process, develop into an organic form. This feedback process comprises two parallel feedback loops that generate a mask/distortion image and the final color image respectively. The motion of colors from frame to frame is determined by each pixel comparing itself to its surroundings and following the general slope of the surrounding color gradient.

The feedback-generated mask image uses the red channel to determine whether each pixel moves toward or away from the brighter colors around it. The green and blue channels of the mask image define a low-resolution distortion map that also influences the movement.

All of this is generated using a series of fragment shaders that capture to a framebuffer to store the results of the process. Because this process is based on live-rendered process, each time the simulation is loaded will be very similar, but may evolve in slightly unique ways. The settings of the Shadow Flora simulations are tuned to dynamically reach a state of relative equilibrium that begins to resemble an animated loop or a constantly radiating form.